War

VICENZA, ITALY

Three Months Later

Day after day of rain and early, sullen dusks. Second Platoon is about to disperse and will never exist again, as such, but the men are too busy — or messed up — to get overly sentimental about it. Bobby is running a fever of 103, coughing like a diesel engine and drinking all day long. Money marries a woman he met on leave a few months earlier. A soldier from Chosen Company gets taken to the hospital in an ambulance after collapsing in his room shrieking that people are trying to kill him. The toughest guys in the platoon find themselves crying every day, and the more vulnerable guys skirt the edge of sanity. “It’s even bothering me,” Bobby confides to me over dinner. “And nothing bothers me. Can you imagine what it’s doing to some of the other guys?”

The petty tyrannies of garrison life have returned, and the men do not react well to getting reprimanded by other men who have never been to war. O’Byrne gets yelled at for not sitting in an armchair properly, meaning that he looks too comfortable. Solowski goes home on leave and finds out that his mother is days or weeks away from dying of liver disease. He uses up eight days of emergency leave and then has to go AWOL in order to stay by her side until the end. She is saved by an emergency transplant, thank God, but when Solowski returns to Vicenza, he gets busted down a rank and is made to work extra duty. Cunningham creeps out of bed at dawn and stands outside Battle Company barracks shouting “ALLAHU AKHBAR!” into a bullhorn. Men stagger out of bed thinking they’re still in the Korengal.

O’Byrne doesn’t fare well. He decides to get out of the Army rather than renew his contract, but he can’t begin to tackle the paperwork in his state of mind. His sister flies in for a visit, and when they go walking around town, O’Byrne becomes convinced someone is following them and takes defensive action. He was less scared in the Korengal, where people were actually shooting at him, than in Italy, where it’s mostly in his head. Eventually his paranoia starts to fulfill itself. He gets attacked in Venice; a guy breaks a bottle over his head and O’Byrne has to jump into a canal to escape. Soon afterward he falls down a flight of concrete stairs and cracks a front tooth and splits open an eyebrow. His explanation, when asked, is that he was attacked by a wolverine.

When I get to Vicenza, O’Byrne has gone AWOL. That’s a problem, because his military ID is about to expire, and when it does he’ll be in some weird limbo where he won’t be allowed on base but he won’t be allowed to go home either. One night Second Platoon is having a barbecue and the guys are standing around talking to some Romanian strippers, and O’Byrne finally calls Hoyt’s cell phone. Hoyt talks to him for a minute and then hands the phone to me with a “See what I mean?” kind of look. O’Byrne is so upset he can barely talk. He’s drunk at a bar in Florence and his wallet is missing and his cell phone has died. He’s talking on a cell he borrowed from some guy in the bar. “The Army’s trying to kill me,” he says. “I don’t dare come back. They’re trying to kill me.”

He finally shows up the next day and Nevala drives him around the base trying to take care of his paperwork. I tag along to see what happens. O’Byrne refers to the base as “Coward’s Land,” because it’s a place where guys who have never done anything but fill out paperwork can boss around guys who have actually fought for their country. A whole new set of rules apply that seem almost deliberately punitive of the traits that make for a good combat soldier. We park in front of something called the Transition Office, and O’Byrne says, “Come in and watch, this is gonna be good.”

There’s a middle-aged black lady behind the desk who seems perfectly nice. O’Byrne takes a mint out of a jar on her desk and gives her one and explains that his paperwork is late and his ID expires in two days. By then he’s supposed to be on a plane home.

“The only acceptable reason for not being on that plane is if you’re in jail,” the woman says. “And if you’re not on that plane you’ll be arrested and put in jail.”

O’Byrne maintains his composure. “So what should I do?” he asks.

“Call your commanding officer,” the woman says, “and ask him to have you arrested. That way you won’t be breaking the rules when you don’t get on the plane.”

If she understands the irony at work here she doesn’t betray it. “Let me get this right,” O’Byrne says. “You want me to ask to get arrested now so I won’t get arrested later?”

“That’s right,” the woman says and returns to her paperwork.

We get up to go and O’Byrne turns to me as we walk out the door. “See?” he says. “See why I hate the Army?”

The Army that saved O’Byrne from himself is now destroying the very man it created — or at least that’s how it seems to O’Byrne. The new battalion commander finally intervenes and sees to it that O’Byrne gets home safely, but civilian life goes even worse than garrison life. Months later, I get a note from him explaining that he wants to go back into the Army. “It’s as if I’m self-destructive, trying to find the hardest thing possible to make me feel accomplished,” he writes. “A lot of people tell me I could be anything I want to be. If that’s true, why can’t I be a fucking civilian and lead a normal fucking life? Probably ’cause I don’t want to.”

You got me there, O’Byrne; you got me there, brother. Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.

Selected Sources and References

Book One: FEAR

Ackerl, Kerstin, Michaela Atzmueller, and Karl Grammer. “The Scent of Fear.” Neuroendocrinology Letters, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2002.

Arthurs, Cmd. Sgt. Maj. Ted G. Land with No Sun: A Year in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne. Stackpole Books, 2006.

Azar, Beth. “Exposure to Aggression May Have Lasting Effects.” American Psychological Association Monitor, Vol. 30, No. 9, October 1999.

Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa, Marco Iacoboni, and Eran Zaidel. “Hemispheric Sensitivity to Body Stimuli in Simple Reaction Time.” Experimental Brain Research, Vol. 170, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 116– 121.

Bar, Herve. “Wood Traffickers Devastate Afghan Forests.” Agence France-Presse, March 5, 2003.

Barry, John, and Michael Hirsh. “Chopper Down over Kunar: A Special Ops Unit Calls for Help, and a Rescue Goes Awry.” Newsweek, July 11, 2005, p. 31.

Blumenfeld, Laura. “The Sole Survivor: A Navy Seal, Injured and Alone, Was Saved by Afghans’ Embrace and Comrades’ Valor.” Washington Post, June 11, 2007.

Botwinick, Jack, PhD, and Larry W. Thompson, PhD. “Age Difference in Reaction Time: An Artifact?” Gerontologist, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1968, pp. 25–28.

Bourne, Peter G., ed. The Psychology and Physiology of Stress, with References to Special Studies of the Viet Nam War. Academic Press, 1969.

Boyer, Maud, Arnaud Destrebecqz, and Axel Cleeremans. “The Serial Reaction Time Task: Learning Without Knowing, or Knowing Without Learning?” In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Erlbaum, 1998, pp. 167–172.

Coates, Stephen. “Moves to Oust Taliban Gain Momentum.” Agence France-Presse, September 27, 2001.

Costa, Paul T., Jr., Antonia Terracciano, and Robert R. McCrae. “Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings.” Journal of Personality and Social